


the lesson you've learned is leaving you dumb

by kafkas



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Demon Ciel Phantomhive, F/M, Intersex Character, M/M, Masochism, Post-Canon, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-04 03:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14011299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: ‘I killed you,’ he says, after a moment’s delay. He is not startled. So little shocks him anymore.‘The body that is sown is perishable, raised imperishable; sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power.’ Landers smiles up at him, a grim, weary thing. ‘Good evening, Sebastian. You’re looking well.’





	the lesson you've learned is leaving you dumb

 

He stumbles across him, quite by chance, in Ypres. Or perhaps it is Loos-en-Gohelle. Everywhere – everyone – looks about the same these days; buildings buckled, faced warped like candlewick. The great, blasted heath of human ingenuity. Landers has long since abandoned his imperial finery – it is the serge coat that initially misleads him, dove grey and unassuming, collar hiked high about the face. A glimpse of wintry hair in the autumnal murk of chlorine gas that makes Sebastian backtrack, peering beneath the fire bay.

‘I killed you,’ he says, after a moment’s delay. He is not startled. So little shocks him anymore.

‘ _The body that is sown is perishable, raised imperishable; sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power_.’ Landers smiles up at him, a grim, weary thing. ‘Good evening, Sebastian. You’re looking well.’

‘I wish I could extend you the same courtesy.’

Landers, knelt in the mud like that Nazarene they all so love to worship, chuckles hoarsely. ‘It is true, I have seen better days.’ The dead soldier that lies sprawled before him is barely more than a boy, all puppy fat and freckles. Sebastian is reminded of Finny, whom the Germans had similarly savaged. He wonders what Landers is planning on doing with the child’s soul – is there another bridge in construction, perhaps?

As if able to read his thoughts, the angel offers him another morsel: ‘If you’re wondering, the answer is no.’

‘No?’

‘No, I don’t have that kind of power anymore.’ With one ungloved hand, white and shining as if it has never seen the sun, Landers slides shut the dead boy’s eyes. There is a brief, watery pulse of light as he draws back his fingertips, chasing after the angel’s touch like a voltaic arc before sputtering into darkness.

Sebastian smells the discharge in the air, molasses thick and sugary. Quite different from how he imagines Ciel’s soul might have tasted.

‘That… should be a grim reaper’s job, no?’

Landers proffers him a long, flat look, as if to say: _have you_ met _that bunch?_ A grin of recognition spreads across Sebastian’s face, wide and fanged. He crouches down beside Landers, who staunchly ignores him, scrubbing at the boy’s grimy cheeks with a monogrammed handkerchief.

‘My, my, Sir Landers, could it be that you’re – what’s the word?’ Sebastian’s voice drops an octave, ‘doing penance?’

‘ _A battered reed He shall not break, a smoking flax He shall not douse, until He leads justice to victory_ –’

‘Dear me, but you _are_.’ Landers stills in his ministrations, hands coming to rest at the boy’s shirt-collar. He does not scowl – it is unbecoming of a celestial being – but there is a certain, seething vitality to the force of his gaze. ‘That’s just like Him,’ Sebastian continues, ‘to build you up from scratch only to stick you on soul detail.’

His eye wanders to Landers’ thin shoulders, coiled tightly beneath the serge coat, and the ash; presses his palm between the blades, where the downy scapulars should sprout. The angel shudders at the contact, pursing his lips until the skin blanches grey. His kind are not like demons – they require constant affection, that paternal approval their Father so coldly denies them. Landers has not been touched kindly in a very long time.

Sebastian remembers how he’d propositioned him all those years ago, even going so far as to bargain Angela – half his mind, his soul. Wonders if that, too, hadn’t just been loneliness.

‘Is your dear sister still with you?’ he asks – gently, because Sebastian is ever so good at gentleness.

‘Would you rather I came to you as her?’

‘Not at all. I was merely enquiring after her health. Propriety insists I engage in small talk, you see…’ Sebastian trails off on a sigh. He is bored, suddenly. It was better when they were trying to kill each other.

‘Propriety?’ Landers blinks at him, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve fallen into another servant’s bind, Sebastian, it doesn’t suit you.’

The demon bites the tip of his winter glove, dragging it from his hand. There the contract seal still lies, black as sable, too intense a color to ever be mistaken for a tattoo. Landers stares at it for a long while, faintly disgusted, as if it might at any moment leap from Sebastian’s skin and scuttle towards him. Then – realization, and, close at its heels, triumph. With an awful, grit-toothed sneer, the angel begins to laugh – a hyena’s yowl, somehow in keeping with the barren landscape beyond the trench wall.

Sebastian thinks of London, of a roaring wall of fire. Hysteria.

‘Ciel Phantomhive,’ he breathes, when he has finally recovered himself. So reverent it is as if he is reciting a ghost story. And isn’t that what they’ve both become, in recent years? Stories? ‘You must be very hungry.’

‘My master keeps me well fed.’

‘Like a loyal dog,’ Landers remarks – and there is the queen’s aide, proud and imperious, ‘begging for scraps.’

‘You’d know plenty about that, wouldn’t you?’

Landers smiles at him. It is not a loving gesture. The angel rises, suddenly, to his feet. Beneath the dilapidated carapace, his movements are fluid, strong. Sebastian half expects him to draw his sword, knowing now that he is starved. But Landers is content enough to stare down at him from above, a stony icon.

‘There’s a townhouse on Witte Straat,’ he says, ‘Blue roof, white awnings. Backs onto a public park.’

‘Desperate for company?’

‘Far from it. I’m simply interested to see how far your leash extends.’

They are interrupted, then, by the wet slap of approaching footfalls. The surviving soldiers, coming to collect their fallen. Sebastian tenses – he had, in the day’s turmoil, found cause to impersonate a German _grenadier_ and still wears the dead man’s uniform. It would be a tricky thing to explain, were he spotted by the British, and Ciel had given him specific orders not to harm any bystanders. He’s such a soft touch for a demon.

‘Witte Straat,’ Landers repeats in his ear, and then he is gone – sprouted wings after all or simply slipped away, Sebastian doesn’t have the time to confirm.

‘Angels,’ he grunts, heaving himself over the lip of the trench, ‘Theatrical lot.’

 

 

 

Ciel is waiting for him at the Hôtel de Crillon when he returns, hair plastered with mud, coat riddled with bullet-holes. A pile of this week’s correspondence lays spread out on the bureau before him; there are the missives from the Funtom Corporation, which he tends to as one might a slow-growing creeper, intervening only when necessary; there are sprawling, overwrought letters from Soma, who is serving in the Indian Cavalry with Agni, and had somehow managed to ply Ciel’s current address from Snake; and then there are the telegrams from Snake himself, current majordomo of the Phantomhive household, detailing estate affairs back in England.

‘They’ve turned the manor into an evacuation shelter. Finny’s idea.’

‘Very charitable of him.’

Ciel crinkles his nose. ‘Snake says they’re housing the larger families in the servants’ quarters. Where, exactly, am I to assume the servants are sleeping?’

‘I doubt Meirin has allowed them to dirty your belongings, young master,’ Sebastian murmurs, when what he really wants to say is: _it’s not as if you’re going to be returning there any day soon._ But he holds his tongue. Above all else, he knows Ciel appreciates normalcy. This is simply an extended holiday, nothing more. Be it a holiday during wartime, but then, none of their holidays have ever quite panned out the way they’d imagined.

Leaning over Ciel’s shoulder, he spies a marquesatte’s seal, the rich blue wax already crumbled under the earl’s letter opener. The reason for his master’s mood, then. ‘Your aunt, the Lady Midford?’

‘Edward’s division ships out in two weeks time,’ Ciel says, affecting an air of disinterest, ‘Suez Canal – Lord Alexis didn’t want him fighting on the Western Front. And… Elizabeth is volunteering at Maudsley’s with Paula. Tending to the wounded.’

‘Kindhearted as always.’

At last, Ciel glances up from his papers, taking in for the first time Sebastian’s ruined clothes, his grit-speckled face. He surveys the older demon with a look of displeasure, head-to-toe.

‘I did tell you to be discreet.’

‘There were – unforeseen obstacles.’ Blood, offal, blooming in his nostrils like sangria.

‘Did you at least get rid of that horrible Jerry scientist like I told you to?’

Sebastian passes a hand over his breast, bowing. ‘If I couldn’t dispatch of one elderly chemist and a dozen vats of xylyl bromide then –’

‘What kind of butler would you be, yes, I know, Sebastian. Very good.’

Sebastian raises his eyebrows, moving, carefully, to the dining cart. Why Ciel doesn’t just toss the letters out if they effect him so is beyond reason – Sebastian can only be grateful that Francis hasn’t divulged Ciel’s whereabouts to the rest of her family. How the young master might respond to Edward turning up in Paris and throwing down the gauntlet – or, worse, Elizabeth herself, more than twenty-years his senior, married and with children of her own, well. Sebastian doesn’t like to envision it.

‘How has your day been?’

Ciel discards Snake’s telegraph, slouching into the depths of his wingback with a heaving sigh. ‘Uneventful.’

Utter torture, then. Sebastian sets the empty saucer of tea down before his young master, watching as Ciel indulges half-heartedly in the play pretend. ‘Do I need to fetch somebody?’

A minute shake of the head. ‘I’ve – already indulged.’ So many years, and yet Ciel still will not assume a demon’s vernacular. Sebastian almost admires him for it.

‘I’ll leave you to your correspondence. Do give my regards to Snake.’

The boy watches him carefully, sullenly, as he moves about the office, fluffing cushions, straightening stacks of paper.

‘Say, Sebastian…’

‘Young master?’

Ciel’s eyes are like dull, pulsing coals in the half-light, red and wary. For a moment, Sebastian wonders if he is going to ask about the trenches, and if he will then be compelled to disclose his meeting with Landers. It occurs to him suddenly that he does not want to – that he would like to have just this one secret, all to himself. He will dispose of the seraph come time.

As if sensing his resolve, Ciel yields, waving him away. ‘Never mind,’ he mumbles, ‘Wash your hands before you even think about touching the bed linen, understood?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

 

 

 

‘Quite the affair you have here.’

‘King Albert and I frequent the same ski lodge. He and my sister have a standing arrangement.’

‘Ah. Not quite abandoned your machiavellian ways, I see.’

Landers shrugs, placidly, as if to suggest Angela’s machinations are beyond his jurisdiction. In the light slanting in through the open window, he looks more like his old self, sylphlike and wistful. The apartment is lavishly decorated in candy-striped blues and greys, the settees stuffed to bursting, the wallpaper freshly laid. Willow-patterned, Sebastian notes, remembering suddenly the matching chinaware Lau had gifted them several years before. He wonders what hand he’s playing in this conflict. Wonders if he’s even alive.

‘I do have to marvel at your composure.’

‘Hm?’

Landers, humming blithely to himself as he glides about the salon, ‘Twenty odd years. I imagine you must be positively frothing at the mouth. Who duped you out of it – the boy’s soul?’

‘Another demon,’ Sebastian answers, flatly, ‘Went by Annafellows.’

‘Seems fitting,’ Landers sniffs, ‘After all, your kind know nothing of fidelity.’

‘So says the fallen angel.’

Landers’ expression twists sourly, and when he next speaks it is with a quivering note of frustration. ‘ _If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our trespasses and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness_.’

‘So magnanimous,’ Sebastian exclaims, ‘… I presume dear sister Angela feels rather differently?’

‘I would refrain from taunting her, if I were you.’

‘Good lord, is that a threat? I didn’t think you possessed the nuance.’

Landers smiles thinly. ‘I like you, demon. I enjoy watching you run about after that vicious little cur, eating out of the palm of his hand like some decrepit old dog. It amuses me. My sister, though –’ he hisses through his teeth, cocks his head, ‘She’s a fickle creature, grows easily bored. That’s why I presided over the throne all that time while she traipsed about the countryside.’

‘And now you’re going to set her loose on me, is that what you’re saying, Ash?’

Landers blinks. ‘Oh, no. You misunderstand. Angela can appear before you whenever she so wishes. You provoke her entirely at your own risk.’

‘Perhaps it pleases me to do so.’

Halfway to the liquor cabinet, Landers’ casts him a doleful look. ‘Have you truly grown so weary of this world?’

‘Haven’t you?’

Landers shakes his head. ‘The hand of the Lord is in everything. The earth alone is evidence of His unfailing love.’

It strikes Sebastian then that Landers truly does believe what he is saying, that he is not simply prophesizing in order to avoid uncomfortable truths. It is baffling that this place should maintain his interest, when humanity had ceased to occupy Sebastian so many years ago. Humans have, he believes, reached the absolute pinnacle of their depravity. To observe any further would be senseless. And yet –

He allows Landers to guide him to the settee, lost in thought.

And yet there are the letters. Agni’s scornful political missives, Lau’s rambling lyricisms. Letters from home – and since when has he ever considered England a home?

Since when has he ever considered Meirin’s ineptitude, Finny’s histrionics, Bards’ – frankly ruinous – capacity for culinary destruction… endearing, rather than vexing? And why does he miss it so?

Perhaps Ciel isn’t the only one who’s been going soft –

He is broken out of his reverie by Landers pressing a glass into his hands. Bourbon, sickly sweet and cloying. Sebastian regards it bemusedly.

‘You know full well I can’t drink this.’

‘Indeed, but we both enjoy a good pantomime, don’t we, Sebastian?’ The familiarity with which Landers speaks the moniker – softly, darkly – suggests some degree of affection. So too does the hand resting on his knee.

Sebastian purses his lips against the rim of the glass, a crease forming between his brows.

_Baffling._

 

 

 

He wakes, abruptly, cringingly, to Angela glaring down at him. She is naked save for the dress-shirt shirt she wears buttoned haphazardly over her breast – Sebastian’s dress-shirt, and he’ll be needing it back if he’s going to cross the Rhineland into Allied territory. Somewhere nearby a church-bell is tolling for morning mass. He’s overslept. Young master will be most displeased.

‘ _Bon matin, ma chérie_. _Avez-tu bien dormi?_ ’

Angela’s voice drips with loathing, ‘You’ll bed anything that moves, won’t you?’

‘To the contrary, my tastes happen to be quite discerning.’

She slaps him, viciously. Sebastian feels a part of his cheek come away under her nails, remembers London, remembers the Tower. White-hot pain, cool like water in the instant before his body registered the agony.

‘Impure,’ she snarls.

‘Oh, please,’ Sebastian breathes, and twists out from under her. His tailcoat and undershirt lay in a crumpled heap upon the bedside table, pants lost somewhere beneath the duvet. He quickly checks for Tanaka’s majordomo pin and, finding it safely tucked beneath his lapel, allows himself a momentary sigh of relief.

‘I had imagined this was all a part of some higher plan.’ He turns, regarding Angela properly. ‘If so, you might’ve killed me in my sleep – I don’t do it very often, you know. Quite the missed opportunity.’

Angela scowls at him. ‘I do not – take advantage of the vulnerable. It is not an angel’s way.’

‘No, you lot just flog people in irons.’

She moves to strike him again, but Sebastian has her grasped by the wrist in an instant, the bones grinding together beneath his fingers. Where anyone else might have yelped in pain, Angela doesn’t so much as flinch.

‘Brother has a weak soul,’ she grits, ‘Father tests him so as to discern the goodness of his nature.’

‘Thrown a spanner in the works there, have I?’

‘You have entrapped him, as the Pharisees bade to entrap Christ.’

‘And what a willing entrapment it was.’ Landers had acquiesced faster than the Lancashire vestal, faster, even, than Mally the lion tamer, who had despised him. At their core, every angel is the same – they love nothing more than to be told that they’re doing a good job – and Sebastian knows how to be tender, when need be. ‘On your knees now, there’s a good fellow,’ he’d murmured, and Landers had looked positively beatific.

At the smirk on his face, Angela bares her teeth. There comes a sound like dart hitting cork – a spray of feathers, embedding itself in Sebastian’s bare chest. Her wings, stooped beneath the bedroom’s low ceiling, cast a shadow over both of them. A moment passes, Sebastian slightly shocked, Angela panting low and ragged above him, feral but lovely.

‘What are you _really_ doing here?’ Sebastian asks, gently, ‘It’s not like you to wallow in self-pity. Your little brother, perhaps, but Lady Blanc is too proud.’ Gingerly, he plucks a feather from his bleeding shoulder, examines the razor-sharp stem. Angela watches, disgusted, as the quills turn to chalk beneath his fingers. ‘Ash mentioned the King of the Belgians. Said you two had an arrangement. Another puppet ruler, is he? Terribly unimaginative of you.’

A twitching grimace, and then she’s clambering off of him, wings tinkling the chandelier above their heads. Angela moves, as she’s always done, with the awkward, lolloping grace of an apex predator. ‘I don’t delude myself that the Lord is merciful,’ she sighs, slipping from the bed, ‘Not to ones such as you or I. I suppose Ash will go on toiling like Sisyphus until the sun winks out, though. He was always the baby of the family. So very faithful.’

‘He doesn’t know?’

Angela shakes her head, curls bouncing. ‘He likes to imagine I share everything with him.’

‘Yes, well.’ Sebastian props himself up on one elbow, reaching for his undershirt. ‘I doubt he’d approve. He’s been working so terribly hard. How ever will you break it to him?’

‘Ash is a coward,’ Angela snaps, ‘ _The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous stand bold as a lion_.’

‘Do you lot have a verse at the ready every time you want to evade a question?’ Another sheath of feathers buries itself in the wall beside Sebastian’s head. A warning shot. He sighs, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘I won’t try to stop you,’ he murmurs, ‘I’m sure you’ll cark it up perfectly well all on your own. Did it ever occur to you that Daddy Dearest might be on the look-out for something just like this?’

Angela purses her lips, bending down to examine her reflection in the vanity mirror. There are dark circles beneath her eyes. An alpine harshness to her jaw, her cheeks. Where others might see marble, Sebastian sees nothing but bleached bone.

‘This body’s a casket,’ she murmurs, dully, ‘Once, my brother and I… We were… Do you know what He did to us, after London? Just how low we were brought? You think you’re cruel? You don’t know cruelty. I’d do anything to –’

‘To cheat Him?’

‘To make Him _love_ us,’ Angela chokes, shuddering, ‘Love us as He did before.’ She is weeping now – not the pretty, breathy tears she’d offered them in Houndsworth, but ugly, heaving sobs, nails digging half-moons into the meat of her palms. Her wings ruffle out around her like the hackles of a frightened animal. ‘It’s so _quiet_ ,’ she hisses, ‘It hurts. It – my ears, ring. Anything is better than His absence. Death, is better.’

‘It’s fortunate you feel that way,’ Sebastian mutters, ‘Because that’s about where you’re headed at this speed.’

Angela rounds on him, eyes flashing. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t feel it too!’

Buttoning his fly, Sebastian shrugs. ‘I’ve never not felt it. Rather difficult to miss something you can’t even remember.’

‘But you’re lonely, aren’t you?’ She tilts her head, smiling cruelly, feverishly. ‘Lonelier than you were before?’ Sebastian bites his tongue as Angela’s fingers encircle his wrist, cool like running water – an empty mimicry of the bruises he’d left stained up her own forearm. ‘It’s the Phantomhive boy, isn’t it?’ she whispers, ‘The one soul you can never claim. Your God.’ Her lips brush the shell of his ear, sibilant. ‘He is your suffering.’

Sebastian shuts his eyes, breathing deeply. ‘I’d like your brother back now.’

‘So he can stroke your ego? I don’t think so. Besides…’ Her grip tightens, then, and something rabid catches in the back of Sebastian’s throat. Angela laughs, softly. ‘I think you and he both enjoy being laid low.’

It is less a kiss and more the thrashing blow of a shrapnel blast. She tastes like copper wiring, like the piercing ache of biting into something cold. Static electricity, scorching the flat of his tongue. It is as close as Sebastian will ever come to experiencing what his victims feel at the moment of release.

The towering white inferno of pain.

 

 

 

He doesn’t make it back to the Crillon until midday. Ciel is justifiably furious.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENWJkXRrcHY)


End file.
